The number of high street bookshops in Britain has more than halved in just
seven years due to the rise of e-books and the consumer downturn, research
for The Daily Telegraph has found.

According to data from Experian there are only 1,878 high street bookshops left in Britain. As recently as 2005 there were 4,000 bookshops on our high streets – twice as many as there are now.

Almost 400 bookshops have closed over the course of 2012 alone, a seven-fold increase in the number that shut in 2011.

The shops have closed due to the prolonged downturn in consumer spending, pressure from supermarkets, and the continued rise of websites such as Amazon, which sell both physical books and electronic e-books online.

New research from analysts at Mintel shows that British consumers spent £261 million on e-books this year, almost double the £138 million spent in 2011. At the same time physical book sales fell from £3.3 billion last year to £3.1 billion this year.

Authors said it would be a “tragedy” if high streets lost more specialist bookshops.

Gyles Brandreth, author of Something Sensational to Read in the Train and the Oscar Wilde Mysteries, said: “The bookshop experience remains unique – you can see the books, feel them, smell them, dip into them. Best of all you can be surprised by what you find,” he said.

Mr Brandreth said that bookshops find it “tough” to compete with the low prices and convenience of web retailers like Amazon. However he said that some shops are achieving it by opening coffee shops and employing “assistants who know about books beyond what are the bestsellers”.

“It will be a tragedy if we lose the [specialist] bookshop. We will all be reduced to buying online books we have seen reviewed or advertised. We won’t even know what else there is,” he said.

James Miller, the author of Sunshine State and Lost Boys, said that high number of closures is “depressing”.

“The great advantage of a bookshop is that it allows you to browse and discover in the way that Amazon doesn’t. Amazon is very good in the sense that it has a copy of everything. But it is not the same as going into a shop and discovering books that you didn’t really know about,” said Mr Miller.

He said that high street bookshops have made the mistake of trying to compete with internet retailers by cutting prices when they should have concentrated on tailoring their offer to their local market.

“A bookshop should be a sort of community hub,” said Mr Miller.

Data company Experian counted the number of specialist bookshops on high streets and shopping centres across the UK – ranging from Waterstones to small independent shops. Its figures do not include supermarkets that have book aisles.

Tim Godfray, chief executive of The Booksellers Association (BA), said that things are “exceedingly tough” for bookshops, who are facing high costs and growing pressure from the internet. However he said that the BA’s own research does not tally with Experian’s and in fact shows that the closure rate of bookshops is declining.

“While the overall picture in terms of the number of independent booksellers in the UK is still one of contraction, our figures contradict the Experian results and indicate this rate of decline actually has been slowing for the last two years,” said Mr Godfray. He added: “We are not seeing the end of the bookshop.”

Mr Godfray said that when e-books and physical books are taken into account, the book market is actually growing, which is “good news” for the industry.

However research shows that consumers’ buying habits are changing. According to Mintel half of all consumers buy “most” of their books online while only a third buy most of their books in bookshops.

Book publishers said that the closures, while sad, reflect the changing habits of book buyers.

Marianne Velmans, publishing director at Doubleday, which publishes authors such as Bill Bryson, Terry Pratchett and Kate Atkinson, said: “It reflects what is going on the high street in general as people’s buying habits change and they move to the internet. It is a situation that has been with us in the book business for a long time. The independent [shops] were first put under pressure by the chains like Waterstones, and now Waterstones is under pressure too from the internet retailers.”

Mr Velmans said that the general decline of the high street is cause for concern. However she said it is hard to run profitable shops in the current climate.

“It is a shame to lose dedicated booksellers who know a lot about books. I think that that is a concern for everybody but you can’t halt progress either. Publishers like ourselves are doing our best to try to support the independent bookshops but it is a tough climate,” she said.